Happy Birthday, Reasoning

Next thing on the history list is the birthday of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.

He was born in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1724. His father was a saddle maker. He studied theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy, and worked for a time as a private tutor. He made very little money at tutoring, but it gave him plenty of time for thinking. He lectured at the University of Königsberg for 15 years, until he was eventually given a tenured position as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. Though he enjoyed hearing travel stories, he never ventured more than 50 miles from his hometown, believing that travel was not necessary to solve the problems of philosophy.

In his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued against Empiricism (exemplified by John Locke and David Hume), which held that the mind was a blank slate to be filled with observations of the physical world, and Rationalism (best exemplified by Rene Descarte, Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza), which held that it was possible to experience the world objectively without the interference of the mind; instead, he synthesized the two schools of thought, added that the conscious mind must process and organize our perceptions, and made a distinction between the natural world as we observe it, and the natural world as it really is. Today, we know that there are a vast number of conceptual mechanisms that structure our understanding of perceptual input, and some of them are hard wired in the brain.

He viewed morality as something that arises from human reason, and maintained that an action's morality is determined not by the outcome of the action, but by the motive behind it. He is also famous for his single moral obligation, the "Categorical Imperative": namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way.

He wrote, "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe ... the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." In regard of the former, Kant was responsible for the basic idea of what is today the accepted model of star and planet formation.

The categorical imperative appears to have resulted in at least one shooting during a beer-fueled dispute.

Russia is the Florida of Europe.

OPENSPACE.SFMOMA.ORG

Russian Man Shot During Argument About Immanuel Kant

In the Russian town of Rostov-on-Dongot, two men got into "a passionate argument" about Immanuel Kant's philosophical theories and the argument…

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